Air pollution records from urban lake sediments: the implications of datable, lacustrine sedimentary archives for epidemiology

摘要

Sediment pollution records from several small, urban, man-made lakes from Merseyside and Halton (N.W. England, UK) are presented. They demonstrate that lake sediments can be used to reconstruct atmospheric pollution histories that encompass the entire Industrial Revolution (the last 250 years) in the U.K. Regionally, this was a period that saw the instigation, development and subsequent expansion of major industrial activity, such as iron and steel production, petrochemical manufacture and power generation, followed by rises in road and air travel. Through the use of analytical techniques, such as environmental magnetism, together with ~(210)Pb dating, urban lacustrine stratigraphic records illustrate that the types and levels of atmospheric pollution have changed temporally. The work promotes the ethos that such archives could be vital to our understanding of past, present and future relationships between human health and the environment.